Influential think-tank backs Finland’s, Sweden’s NATO bid 

What could possibly go wrong? by James Carden May 26, 2022

One of the least appreciated yet most important functions of Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy “Blob” is the role it plays in making the unreasonable sound reasonable, and the new and potentially dangerous sound utterly benign and mundane. 

In presenting changes in policies that have been in place for several generations, the Blob will wink and, with an assuring smile, tell us: Not to worry, there is no real change here.

That, in effect, was the message attendees received this week at a Brookings Institution panel event regarding what is looking very much like yet another round of NATO expansion. 

Ambassadors from the likely 31st and 32nd members, Sweden and Finland, made their case to a friendly audience with the help of a pair of Brookings interlocutors Constanze Stelzenmüller and Michael O’Hanlon. 

Thomas Wright, now a member of US President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, but for years prior had served as the director of Brookings’ Center for the United States and Europe, was once quoted in The New York Times as saying the Blob is but a myth in the minds of credulous outsiders who have never had the good fortune to be admitted into the club.

“My impression is that people who talk about the Blob,” Wright said in September 2021, “have not read or inquired into what the people in the think-tanks have actually said about the topic. They don’t know what they’re talking about.” In other words, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

This week’s event, featuringthe Finnish ambassador to the US, Mikko Hautala, and the Swedish ambassador to the US, Karin Olofsdotter, comes only a week after the two Nordic countries officially submitted their respective bids for membership at NATO headquarters in Brussels. 

The move has gained wide and enthusiastic support in Washington policy circles, not least at Brookings, where the pair of ambassadors were given a warm welcome by retired four-star Marine General John Allen, who now serves as Brookings’ president.